• Jay (unregistered)

    I often say, "I'm sorry, but we had to do this for technical reasons" when what I really mean is, "It was too much trouble to figure out how to do it right."

  • airdrik (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    I often say, "I'm sorry, but we had to do this for technical reasons" when what I really mean is, "It was too much trouble to figure out how to do it right."
    Yeah, they probably tried to cobble together some localization solution but couldn't figure it out so they just used fixed strings.
  • (cs)

    That's not a UTF-8 fail, that's a Microsoft Word fail. Someone typed that letter up in Word and then, for whatever reason, copied and pasted it into something else before printing it out. Word turns quotes and apostrophes into "smart quotes" and uses weird, non-standard characters that no other program I've seen understands, and so you end up with garbage that looks just like that in the text.

    I've seen it plenty of times before, and even had to debug a few systems where someone copying and pasting something from Word with an apostrophe in it ended up causing database failures when they went to save it. The whole idea's a nuisance, IMO. Apparently Word is smart enough to automatically insert "smart quotes" when you type, but not smart enough to filter them back out when you copy! Grr...

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler
    Mason Wheeler:
    That's not a UTF-8 fail, that's a Microsoft Word fail. Someone typed that letter up in Word and then, for whatever reason, copied and pasted it into something else before printing it out. Word turns quotes and apostrophes into "smart quotes" and uses weird, non-standard characters that no other program I've seen understands, and so you end up with garbage that looks just like that in the text.

    ………

    U+2019, U+201B, U+201D and U+201E, the “smart quotes”, are valid unicode characters. The problem is the other programs that don’t use the right encoding on the pasted text.

  • (cs) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    Bob:
    Please try to show some sensitivity. I had a son who was funny, and let me assure you: it was no laughing matter.
    Why do you assert that i am you son? That's just bullsh*t!

    This Bob and i, we are not related!

    I am not his son and he is not my uncle!

    TRWTF is registering a sock puppet name that's part of a tired meme that was never funny to begin with.

  • (cs) in reply to frits
    frits:
    Vic:
    "I honestly can't think of what 'technical reasons' would cause this"
    Maybe the code looks something like the following: 
    for(int i=0;i<numberOfQuestions;i++)
{
    <span style="color:#00AAAA;">Question question = Question.GetRandomQuestion();
    question.Number = 1;//TODO: This should be i + 1.  Pls fix it.
    m_Questions.Add(question);
}
//Issue 123456: frits- Changed it to this and committed it.
m_Form.Heading[0] = "There are " + numberOfQuestions + 
" in this assessment.  However, due to technical reasons each question is numbered as \"Question 1\"";
    Who hasn't done something like this?
  • Bronie (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler
    Mason Wheeler:
    That's a Microsoft Word fail. Word turns quotes and apostrophes into "smart quotes" and uses weird, non-standard characters that no other program I've seen understands

    Wrong. They are absolutely standard, and can be found in Unicode.

    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?

  • (cs) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    I often say, "I'm sorry, but we had to do this for technical reasons" when what I really mean is, "It was too much trouble to figure out how to do it right."
    I often say, "I'm sorry, but we had to do this for technical reasons" when what I really mean is, "I just... I just don't care."
  • (cs) in reply to Bronie
    Bronie:
    Mason Wheeler:
    That's a Microsoft Word fail. Word turns quotes and apostrophes into "smart quotes" and uses weird, non-standard characters that no other program I've seen understands

    Wrong. They are absolutely standard, and can be found in Unicode.

    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?

    No, our software handles Unicode just fine. (Like I said, the problem came in saving to the database. We didn't write the database in question; Oracle did. Another WTF, but unrelated to the topic at hand.)

    And if it was just one program, I might believe you. But when this sort of fail happens consistently, even (quite frequently) in Web browsers, that's another matter. I can always tell a story that was written in Word and then turned into HTML, because no matter what I set the character encoding to, it can't get the quotes right, even when it can properly display other special characters.

  • Matt (unregistered)

    "We noticed that you didn[wtf*tardness]t change your password until now, so we changed is for you."

    So, wait, are you saying I waited too long to change my password, so you just changed it again?!? TRWTF is nested somewhere in several layers of WTF-edness here....

  • (cs) in reply to Dazed
    Dazed:
    If someone rings you up requesting a password change, how do you determine if the person is who he says he is?

    If someone asks you to send a new password to an arbitrary e-mail address, how do you determine if it is legitimate? (Or were you planning to send the password to the university mail address which the student can't log in to because he hasn't got the password?

    Reminds me of the password change system we had some 10 year back. You had to type the current and new password in a (internally only accible) website, and upon completion got a message like: 'Your password change will take effect within the next few hours, you will recieve an email when it is in effect.'

    Only problem?..

    You had to log in to see the email. Won the 'Most usless use of corporate email' award... ;-)

    Yours Yazeran.

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler
    Mason Wheeler:
    Bronie:
    Mason Wheeler:
    That's a Microsoft Word fail. Word turns quotes and apostrophes into "smart quotes" and uses weird, non-standard characters that no other program I've seen understands

    Wrong. They are absolutely standard, and can be found in Unicode.

    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?

    No, our software handles Unicode just fine. (Like I said, the problem came in saving to the database. We didn't write the database in question; Oracle did. Another WTF, but unrelated to the topic at hand.)

    And if it was just one program, I might believe you. But when this sort of fail happens consistently, even (quite frequently) in Web browsers, that's another matter. I can always tell a story that was written in Word and then turned into HTML, because no matter what I set the character encoding to, it can't get the quotes right, even when it can properly display other special characters.

    Oh, please show us your code to save Unicode text in Oracle. I'm guessing the WTF is more with you than with Oracle.

  • blah (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    U+2019, U+201B, U+201D and U+201E, the “smart quotes”, are valid unicode characters. The problem is the other programs that don’t use the right encoding on the pasted text.

    Older versions of Word used codepage 1252, where those characters are hex 91 through 94. That usually caused problems when you pasted into any non-MS program. Nowadays, the situation is improving.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to JamieC
    JamieC:
    Wow, the number of sponsors is really slipping. Used to be, what, about 15.

    Maybe that explains why the moderators have been so aggressive deleting comments lately. They have been losing too many sponsors who do not want to viewed ajacent to Zuney Tunes posts.

    That or the real Nagesh has been lobbying the sponsors to boycott this site based on the original fake Nagesh and all the other Nagesh clones ruining his good name.

  • Ian (unregistered)
    "I honestly can't think of what 'technical reasons' would cause this," notes Vic.

    My guess: the software groups the questions into sections, which are each numbered separately and displayed on separate pages. The person who designed the assessment wanted each question on its own page, so they put each question in its own section, with the result that each question is #1 in its section.

  • Bholt (unregistered)

    Internet Explorer 7 had a rendering bug where certain styles would cause every item in an ordered list to be shown as 1. This could be the "technical reason"

  • Bronie (unregistered) in reply to Ian
    Ian:
    "I honestly can't think of what 'technical reasons' would cause this," notes Vic.

    My guess: the software groups the questions into sections, which are each numbered separately and displayed on separate pages. The person who designed the assessment wanted each question on its own page, so they put each question in its own section, with the result that each question is #1 in its section.

    That was my guess, too, but then who on the earth would say "technical" about non-hardware problem?

  • (cs) in reply to PedanticCurmudgeon
    PedanticCurmudgeon:
    no laughing matter:
    Bob:
    Please try to show some sensitivity. I had a son who was funny, and let me assure you: it was no laughing matter.
    Why do you assert that i am you son? That's just bullsh*t!

    This Bob and i, we are not related!

    I am not his son and he is not my uncle!

    TRWTF is registering a sock puppet name that's part of a tired meme that was never funny to begin with.

    Yes it was, it was fucking brilliant.

  • Zuy Incognito (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    JamieC:
    Wow, the number of sponsors is really slipping. Used to be, what, about 15.
    Maybe that explains why the moderators have been so aggressive deleting comments lately. They have been losing too many sponsors who do not want to viewed adjacent to Zuney Tunes posts.
    Why wouldn't they want to be next to information as enlightening and informative as my posts? Like... the one where you and your family were taken hostage and you were forced at gunpoint to sodomize them, in what order would you do it? The wife first is the obvious answer, but what about son/daughter? And where is the dog on this list? Do you fuck the dog first, 'cause the dog will still like you tomorrow?

    You need to think about these things.

    Anon:
    That or the real Nagesh has been lobbying the sponsors to boycott this site based on the original fake Nagesh and all the other Nagesh clones ruining his good name.
    And now you're spoiling my good name!
  • (cs) in reply to Zuy Incognito
    Zuy Incocknitro:
    Anon:
    That or the real Nagesh has been lobbying the sponsors to boycott this site based on the original fake Nagesh and all the other Nagesh clones ruining his good name.
    And now you're spoiling my good name!
    Wait - What?!?
  • (cs)

    Holy crap... It's a sock puppet show!

  • (cs)

    The drop-down would reveal that you can select either "Gray" or "Grey" for the value of Black, depending upon which English-speaking country you'd like your item shipped to.

    Remember: gray is a color, but grey is a colour.

    (I wonder if some of my fellow Prog Anals would enjoy seeing the European Union Chamber Orc.)

  • (cs)

    In case anyone's wondering how many times that quotation mark got encoded:

    >> "didn\u2019t"
=> "didn’t" 
>> _.force_encoding("windows-1252").encode("utf-8")
=> "didn’t" 
>> _.force_encoding("windows-1252").encode("utf-8")
=> "didn’t" 
>> _.force_encoding("windows-1252").encode("utf-8")
=> "didn’t"
  • Levitz (unregistered)

    A canadian using Internet Explorer 6 with McAfee toolbar. That was, my friends, TRWTF.

    CAPTCHA: immitto. No, I'd rather not immittate.

  • nnout (unregistered) in reply to Hortical
    Hortical:
    frits:
    Vic:
    "I honestly can't think of what 'technical reasons' would cause this"
    Maybe the code looks something like the following: 
    for(int i=0;i<numberOfQuestions;i++)
{
    <span style="color:#00AAAA;">Question question = Question.GetRandomQuestion();
    question.Number = 1;//TODO: This should be i + 1.  Pls fix it.
    m_Questions.Add(question);
}
//Issue 123456: frits- Changed it to this and committed it.
m_Form.Heading[0] = "There are " + numberOfQuestions + 
" in this assessment.  However, due to technical reasons each question is numbered as \"Question 1\"";
    Why does your syntax highlighting make me hate you so much?

    Really. I'm not saying you deserve it at all, to the contrary, it's cool that you make your posts more readable, but for some reason it just really, really pisses me off.

    What's the deal? I don't know! I'm sure you're a great guy, but if you were sitting next to me right now, my stapler would be flying at your head.

    Sorry, man. Not trying to make you feel bad, but I'd love to shove you out of your chair and stomp on your face. Maybe rub it in some broken glass.

    I feel bad for even thinking about this, to be honest, but I can't shake it.

    DIE! DIE! DIE!

    ^Sorry about that. I didn't actually mean it. It's just some irrational impulse I don't understand - don't read anything into it.

    Oh, well, I'll try doing some work for once to take my mind off of it. Have a nice day!

    u should join your local FIGHT CLUB. u might have some difficult locating, because of the 1st rule.

  • (cs)

    I wanted to know if the "European Union Chamber Orcs" have as much fun as those Vikings in the bank card commercials.

  • BushIdo (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Come now, guys! It's not fair to treat him like this just because he's the Pentagon's chief dev for drones!

  • BushIdo (unregistered) in reply to mernen

    Weeeell.

    On the other hand, it was only slightly misplaced. I mean they real did want him to ’ change that â€â„ed up passwort, because it was getting ’ insecure for â€â„'s sake. But he ’t simply din't ’ change it.

  • Arvind (unregistered)
    "I honestly can't think of what 'technical reasons' would cause this," notes Vic.

    I can think of one: the number is converted to boolean.

  • Arvind (unregistered) in reply to JamieC
    JamieC:
    Wow, the number of sponsors is really slipping. Used to be, what, about 15.

    What sponsor?

  • (cs) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    Holy crap... It's a sock puppet show!
    It's a crap!

    Die, Akismet, DIE, DIE, DIE!

  • Gesh (unregistered)

    Notice that there are a couple of spelling errors in that last letter:

    - so we changed _is_ for you (Paragraph 1, should be _it_)
- Please _notice_: (Paragraph 3, should be _note_)

    Gesh

  • Roman (unregistered) in reply to Bronie
    Bronie:
    Mason Wheeler:
    That's a Microsoft Word fail. Word turns quotes and apostrophes into "smart quotes" and uses weird, non-standard characters that no other program I've seen understands

    Wrong. They are absolutely standard, and can be found in Unicode.

    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?

    Chinese letters, eh?

  • Nagesh (unregistered) in reply to Roman
    Roman:
    Bronie:
    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?
    Chinese letters, eh?
    Sure. These ones.
  • Bronie (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    Roman:
    Bronie:
    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?
    Chinese letters, eh?
    Sure. These ones.

    Just 夫槭宄它 心夫夫, you two

  • Roman (unregistered) in reply to Bronie
    Bronie:
    Nagesh:
    Roman:
    Bronie:
    I guess your software can't understand another things too - like Chinese or Russian letters, eh?
    Chinese letters, eh?
    Sure. These ones.

    Just 夫槭宄它 心夫夫, you two

    I'm sorry, what do you mean by "Fuqiguita heart Fufu"?

  • (cs) in reply to Roman
    Roman:
    Bronie:
    Just 夫槭宄它 心夫夫, you two
    I'm sorry, what do you mean by "Fuqiguita heart Fufu"?
    So now we know who knows about Google Translate.

    It's gibberish as written, of course. But a character by character breakdown is something like this:

    夫 = husband 槭 = maple(?) 宄 = gui (? - my dictionary doesn't have this character) 它 = it 心 = heart 夫 = husband 夫 = husband

    My guess is Bronie typed something in English and then changed to some bogus "Chinese letter" font. Given the repeated characters, I assume the original message was "fuck off".

  • (cs)

    Been a while since I was doubled over with laughter. Good job, Error'd.

  • Nick (unregistered) in reply to JamieC

    Strange now they're needed at all. Running a website like this costs peanuts, the banner ads ought to be enough.

  • (cs) in reply to Migala
    Migala:
    Don't you guys read the fashion mags?
    No need, I'm married.

    (She gives me a certain look.) "Are you going to wear that today?"

    It's remarkable how quickly you pick up on these things when you get married, and what matches with what, and more importantly, what doesn't.

    You may write distributed N-tier applications for a living, or write software to develop NASA's next big project, but in the eyes of a women you have the dress sense of a three year old.

  • Grammar nazi (unregistered)

    I like the last one.

    You do it wrong, so we do it worse, because we're the security guys, and we can't let anyone have worse security practices than we have (it's a deontology thing).

  • (cs) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    Migala:
    Don't you guys read the fashion mags?
    No need, I'm married.

    (She gives me a certain look.) "Are you going to wear that today?"

    It's remarkable how quickly you pick up on these things when you get married, and what matches with what, and more importantly, what doesn't.

    You may write distributed N-tier applications for a living, or write software to develop NASA's next big project, but in the eyes of a women you have the dress sense of a three year old.

    I just own a bunch of stuff that matches each other (protip: khaki matches almost anything). I've considered moving to the Brundle-fly (when he was still just Brundle) school of fashion: Buy 5 identical outfits, one for each day of the work week. No thought required.

  • Jupiter (unregistered) in reply to AshamedCanuck
    AshamedCanuck:
    anon:
    '"Finally, someone software that's written for my native, Canadian tounge," writes Randy.'

    Do you all speak with a Mancunian accent then?

    I'm Canadian, so if I see Randy today, I will be sure to slap him, and slap him hard.

    In Canada to get the version number do you go to the aboot box?!

  • Ken B. (unregistered)

    (Wow. 93 comments so far, and no one has yet pointed this one out.)

    "the shipping is a flat rate of 5 dollars... but if I buy $99,984.01 worth of products I'll get free shipping!"
    No, it's spend an additional $99,984.01. With the $15.99 already, that's a total of $100,000.00
  • (cs) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    Migala:
    Don't you guys read the fashion mags?
    No need, I'm married.

    (She gives me a certain look.) "Are you going to wear that today?"

    It's remarkable how quickly you pick up on these things when you get married, and what matches with what, and more importantly, what doesn't.

    You may write distributed N-tier applications for a living, or write software to develop NASA's next big project, but in the eyes of a women you have the dress sense of a three year old.

    Yes but who the fuck cares about what shit a woman thinks?

  • Muzer (unregistered)

    Whatever happened to the regularly-scheduled, slightly off-topic programme?

  • (cs)

    For a long time I thought that J.S. Bach's extremely famous "Air" from the orchestral suite n°3 was called the "Orc Suite". The MP3 file of the song I downloaded had his name truncated.

  • C (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    Vic:
    "I honestly can't think of what 'technical reasons' would cause this"
    Maybe the code looks something like the following: 
    for(int i=0;i<numberOfQuestions;i++)
{
    <span style="color:#00AAAA;">Question question = Question.GetRandomQuestion();
    [...]
}
[...]
    You almost had it with the "Random" idea... But then why on earth would you randomize and keep the original numbers, so that the cheaters would simply look the answer in their numbered list of correct answers? :-B

    Guess the idea of showing the /current/ numbering order never occurred to anyone there. ^^

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to SCB
    SCB:
    name:
    zeroth?

    hi askimet

    No. For technical reasons, every comment is Frist.

    Finally! FRIST! Been waiting so long for that.
  • Tortoise (unregistered)

    I don't see the problem with the last one. Lots of people donăĢĢ‚¬Ģ„¢t change their passwords when administrators tell them to do is.

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